


you couldn't destroy me

by Massiel



Series: a very strange, enchanted boy [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Star Wars Episode V: Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Destiny, Fate, Gen, The Dark Side of the Force, The Force, The Light Side of the Force, Written Pre-Episode IX, balance, failure - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-02
Updated: 2018-02-02
Packaged: 2019-03-12 04:06:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13539357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Massiel/pseuds/Massiel
Summary: “You mean it controls your actions?”“Partially, but it also obeys your commands.”--Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars Episode IV: A New HopeThe Force has always guided Luke’s hand. Sometimes its touch has been heavier than others.





	you couldn't destroy me

**Author's Note:**

> You have to admit, looking back on Luke's path through the galaxy, the Force does plenty of controlling and obeying. But mostly controlling.
> 
> With any luck, I will be able to post the Ben installment of this series (probably the last, too) by the end of February, but I don't want to make any promises, either.
> 
> Edited once again by my beloved Catline.

“Silence taunts: a dare. Everything that disappears

Disappears as if returning somewhere.” 

— _Tracy K. Smith, “The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack”_

 

_I._

 

From the first moment he can scurry across the sand, from before he can do even that, Luke reaches toward the light. 

At his birth, he and his twin sister are a candle holding back the encroaching darkness. It is too great a burden to put on two children, let alone one—to pin the future of the galaxy on such a fragile hope. Even the Force at times wavers, uncertain if Padmé’s final words 

 

(a gasped _there’s good in him_ )

 

were the despairing wish of a dying woman or a confirmation that its plan is unfolding like a flower. 

But the children are Skywalkers. They have inherited indomitable spirits and hearts like kindling.

And all is as the Force wills it.

Given time, and a spark of reckless courage.

There is, as the boy’s uncle says, too much of his father in him.

 

_II._

 

Staring into those setting suns rouses something in Luke that he can’t quite name. As long as he’s been alive it’s resided there—a swelling feeling inside his chest that nearly bursts him apart at the seams. A sense beyond knowledge that something _more_ waits.

He keeps these dreams to himself until the fateful day the hermit Ben Kenobi gives them a voice, a name. Luke holds on to this idea of the Force, the idea of following in his father’s footsteps, like a lantern through the night of his grief. 

The smuggler transporting them dismisses the Force’s power out of hand, and the Force finds it amusing that for all the experiences the man boasts of, he cannot _see_ , has not recognized the shadow it casts. Luke is endearingly indignant on its behalf.

When he finally opens his senses to it, with Kenobi’s encouragement, the Force sighs in recognition. He blends the best of his mother and father in spirit. The boy responds as if they’ve worked hand-in-hand as conscious partners all his life. 

But the Force takes as easily as it gives: as it gives him an escape from the moon-sized killing machine—and, unbeknownst to him, his sister—it takes yet another person from him.

Just to bring him back when the time is right. The Force dances, and it pulls the strings of the universe, and for the briefest of moments the three—Anakin, Luke, and Kenobi—are connected before their world bursts with triumphant light.

 

_III._

 

The Force loves to confound the expectations of those who wield it, and none more than the one in exile on Dagobah. He would rather train the girl, claiming the boy is too much like his father.

If he only knew, it thinks. Leia is even more her father, in rage and leadership.

Yoda speaks to Luke of the slippery emotions of fear and anger, of the all-consuming nature of the Dark side, and the Force sends a ripple of doubt through the boy. 

And then the wizened old alien sends him into the cave.

It waits inside, concentrated in the darkness. It manifests as Vader, and though he doesn’t know it yet, the Force senses Luke understands the sign, two-fold as it is.

He only sees the first: that what he took inside this cave of evil is his potential to become like Vader, if he does not resist the Dark side.

When he meets Vader again, he is prepared: Luke _will not join him_ , even when he claims that their destinies lie alongside one another. In the face of his fear and pain, Luke contains his emotions, rebuffing the Sith’s offer, ignoring his insistence on his importance.

And then the bottom falls out of his world.

Vader says it softly, and the Force knows why, but in this moment, all that matters is Luke’s horror, his anger, his desperate pleas to know why Kenobi hid the truth.

They both know why, in the cave, he saw his face in Vader’s mask.

 

_IV._

 

His final conversation with Yoda echoes in his head when Ben Kenobi’s shimmering form walks out of the swamp. _The truth. The Dark side will dominate your destiny._

Kenobi tells him another version of the truth, and Luke finds himself saying, as if something greater than him is using his mouth, that there is good in Vader still. 

 

(It echoes through his mind as he speaks like a collective memory; somewhere else in time and space they are a queen’s final blessing.)

 

The Force hurts, hearing Kenobi say there is no hope, that the man who was once Anakin must die. But this is the one thing he is wrong about: Luke will follow his destiny. He will face Vader again.

And the boy is right, too. He will not kill his father. He’ll bring him back, holding onto his tenuous connection to the light with both hands. Even as he argues with his father, then comes to agree with him that the man he once was is dead, every cell in his being whispers the truth of it.

Anger at the sight of the Rebellion fighting for its life momentarily blots out that sliver of light, and Luke _fights_ , tapping into feelings that are meant to be forbidden to him, until the Emperor points it out—

—he stops once. He is rewarded with an attack, and parries until he flips out of reach, turning his lightsaber off a second time.

Because the attack is _reluctant_.

It’s just that—and this Luke is sure of, somehow—Vader is unaware of it.

This does not stop him from driving Vader to his knees, putting his father at his mercy.

_Mercy. The one thing Vader has never shown._

_… A thing Vader has never expected or deserved._

 

(But maybe Anakin did, once.)

 

Luke steps away, flings his lightsaber aside, because he is a Jedi, like his father before him.

In his vulnerability, he is hit by lightning.

It could have been his father, it could have been the Force, but he thinks he hears the word “no,” and then the pain stops.

Panic reigns on the Death Star. No one notices him dragging his father to a ship. No one sees the father and son be truly that for the first time. No one but the Force.

All Anakin sees in his final moments is Luke, and all Luke sees in his grief is Anakin, and it is only when he catches a glimpse of his father’s spirit, nodding at him as they are both surrounded by the ones they love, that he returns his father’s smile.

 

_V._

 

Years later, he takes his nephew to train him as a Jedi, the way he was taught by the boy’s namesake, the way his father was, too. Ben is incredibly powerful, in a way that Luke has never seen before and hardly understands. 

It doesn’t frighten him. Not yet.

What does strike that precipitous emotion in him, the Force senses, is their family’s history with the Dark. 

If only Luke had witnessed Anakin’s life as the Force did, it would not be so difficult for the Jedi to see the answer is right in front of him: a boy seeking reassurance that his anger, his thoughts, are not evil.

Of course, in the matter of Ben Solo, it is not quite that simple.

But even as Luke does his best to follow in the enlightened footsteps of his own mentors, accumulating students and teaching them the ways of the Force, balance slips on its fulcrum. 

Because he is intently focused on the Light, as he has always been.

How could he know to be otherwise?

How could he know that light cannot shine unchecked forever?

Not once was he taught to find the balance within. Not for over a thousand years have the Jedi taught that opposites are not always evils, that parts of the Force are the opposite of everything they hold dear. Parts of _themselves_.

He cannot pass on what he has learned if he has not learned _this_.

Darkness creeps back into the universe, and doubt with it.

 

_VI._

 

He sees it as the defining moment of his life, and he sees it as a failure. Like a true Skywalker, he is right in one way and wrong in another. Ordinary beings are not the only ones to fear what they do not see, to fear _potential_ ; the Jedi always have.

It led to their downfall the last time, too.

Luke stands over his nephew and looks into his mind, an invasion he justifies with concern for his other students.

What he finds is a swirling abyss, a void seeking something to consume.

 

(He does not consider that it has already found its victim.)

 

As much as Luke desired to follow in his father’s footsteps, the Force has never sought out his darkest nature like Anakin—or Ben. He cannot comprehend what it is like to have the opposite ends of the Force struggle within him for years on end.

It is the same Dark that lurks in Ben that whispers the universe might be better off this way, to ignite his lightsaber.

It is the same Light that let him see that even Vader deserved redemption that extinguishes it again.

By then, it is too late. Where the Force returns to its resting place in Luke, it reaches a tipping point in Ben.

There is no way to atone for this: Ben fallen, his students dead and turned, the temple burned, nothing left. Nothing but him and his connection to the Force.

But it was the Force that led him here. ( _That led him astray?_ he’ll ask later, in exile, questioning everything he knows.)

On Ahch-To, one of the planets where its presence is strongest, he cuts himself off from its cocoon, thinking he does not deserve it, thinking it is safest.

It lets him go; he’ll come back in due time.

Everything returns to the Force, Skywalkers most of all.

 

_VII._

 

He threw his father’s lightsaber away once before, and it had been the right decision then as it is now. Luke has witnessed what using it can do; his greatest triumphs did not come from its blade.

The galaxy, he thinks, will have to save itself. Without him.

But this girl, a nobody from a desert planet—his own origins, long ago—is persistent and strong, as strong as Ben.

If the Force could reach out to him now, it would comfort him. Instead, it hovers around him, waiting. It cannot use him, but it _knows_ him. He will train the girl.

And so he does. And the Force is pleased that he apparently—finally—understands that it planned this life with opposites, that even that life itself has death, and both sides of the Force can coexist in one being. It is a matter of balance; has he not seen the depiction of the Prime Jedi on the temple’s floor, its very foundations?

Old fears die hard. Old failures, on the other hand, resurrect themselves and become second attempts.

Luke lowers his walls, and the Force is waiting.

As before, there is no killing blow against his blood. No strikes. Because there is a chance. He’ll die giving the Resistance that chance, and he’ll die reminding Ben that he has one, too.

After all, it’s their legacy.

He vanishes from the salt plains, collapsing on the rocky temple floor. He knows the time has come, and he is ready, truly ready. There’s just one last thing he wants to see…

Luke turns his face to the setting suns, and feels complete.

Perhaps Yoda was right, and he had wasted time in his youth looking away, into a future that was so precarious that it almost didn’t exist, when he gazed at that binary sunset.

But as he feels his consciousness touch the infinite, he knows the light he sought as a child wasn’t simply the future. It was home.


End file.
